But I Don’t Wanna

Getting up and on with it every day is a choice. Even raising the question may baffle some people. “Of course, we have to get up every morning and face the day.”

No we don’t. Not really. And therein lies the miracle and mystery of our lives.

It has been a long time since I heard the phrase “will to live.” We have not been actively and daily engaged in close-to-home wars or other mass traumas that provide us with examples. Yet I believe it is still very much a thing. How else does staying alive make any sense after heart shredding and gut-wrenching losses?

I watch in wonder at beautiful young men and women whose limbs have been blown off in foreign lands. They come home to recover and rehabilitate. What they have to recover from defies understanding. How they manage to go through the rehabilitation required to re-engage in their lives stupefies me.

These young men and women are lucky enough – if you can call it that – to have well-supported systems in place to aid in their recovery. And they go through recovery with fellow travelers dealing with similar injuries. They help each other find a reason to keep on living and moving forward.

War has always been riddled with stories of hope and recovery even in the most miserable and bleak conditions imaginable. I recently finished watching the mini-series The Pacific on Netflix. Not only did I not know much about the skirmishes that took place in the Forties in that part of the world, the story unfolds unsparingly episode by episode in reflecting the horrors of war.

I winced (as did any others who watched the series, I am sure) during a scene where an American Marine tosses rocks into the open skull and exposed brain of a recently killed Japanese soldier, sitting upright with his rifle still in his hands.

I did come away from that series with a better understanding of why veterans share such a deep and intractable bond. Sharing extreme experiences can do that.

Parents whose children were murdered in mass shootings. Victims of natural disasters. They likely use the same god-given techniques to get through and live with it. That experience was and would always be “theirs.”

Opportunities for extreme bonding generally diminish as we get older. Gone is the fresh blush and deep impact of first experiences (reflect on your first kiss or lover). We are more open and malleable in youth.

In fact, a key part of staying “young at heart” is remaining open. Which can be quite a challenge. Many people don’t even bother.

I recently attended a high school reunion where it was exciting and fun to catch up with our remaining high school buddies. The telling part was the stories of those who are still around and didn’t come. They hated high school then and saw no good reason to relive it now in their dotage.

Fair enough. But that attitude comes at a cost to everyone. Both themselves and those of us who missed seeing them again. It is very likely now that we never will.

We eventually learn to roll with life’s punches. We realize loss is a constant as life continually renews itself. “Out with the old, in with the new.” Like leaves in autumn, our friends start falling from the tree of our lives. Celebrities who defined our adulthood start to leave, too. Ryan O’Neal most recently.

Even political stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor have recently died. (I recall trying to reach her by telephone for the better part of a day for an interview on CBC-Radio when she was first appointed back in the Eighties. My calls were not returned. A missed journalistic coup.)

So this morning (if it wasn’t obvious), I didn’t wanna get up and face the day. No harm would have been done by me whiling the day away in bed. I’ve done it before. But, no. There is a “to-do” list to face. And a husband to make coffee for. And a blog post to write. And Christmas looming.

We may never fully understand and appreciate what external and internal forces get us up and moving forward every day. But I’m sure our will to live has something to do with it. And our tacitly held expectation of pleasant and happy surprises. Especially around Christmas.

This season of light and miracles practically demands we engage with or at least acknowledge the beautiful mysteries and possibilities of life. That’s enough to get me up and going on most days even as I balance less beautiful challenges with utterly no mystery.

It is all part of the whole that we eventually learn to accept as life. Both the astonishingly good and the horrifically bad.

A line from the poem Desiderata sums it up: “With all of its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

On it – even if somewhat sleepily and reluctantly this particular morning.

Auld Lang Syne

I finally caught up with an old friend last week after a number of false starts. Hung up with mixed feelings.

Full disclosure: I have been under an enormous strain these past few months for a number of reasons. I have lived with a PTSD diagnosis for a long time. Some of the strain in my life has been deeply triggering. I am trying to navigate and resolve those feelings. There doesn’t appear to be a quick fix.

Here’s how triggered PTSD manifests in me: I talk my fool head off and mostly about me. I can’t fully explain why I do that or what that feels like. It is as if I am fighting for my life. It feels like I MUST make my position and feelings known and clear to whoever I am talking to. I desperately seek validation and reassurance.

That is compounded as I am terrified of not being heard. I am terrified that some crisis will happen because I didn’t warn someone strongly enough about what I see is about to happen. Not that I have ultimately been listened to anyway. To the listener, of course, it comes off as self-absorbed poppycock.

The listener isn’t wrong. Especially when they have no idea of the strain you are under or have been out of your life for a while. Life intervenes. Stuff happens.

So it was an odd phone call where the dynamic quickly shifted from “girls catching up.” She transitioned into “counsellor” mode and I was relegated to being “the patient.” It felt icky.

No doubt it was discomfiting on her part to engage in a phone call you thought would be a cheer-filled catchup only to find you are faced by a barrage of well-worn, existential complaints. And not for the first time.

I have had to navigate this dichotomy my whole life. Raised without solid boundaries or a clear and solid sense of self, I have erred on the boundary crashing front in extremis. I have had to identify and learn for myself what most of my peers picked up just by living at home.

Nowhere has this been more troublesome than in intimate relationships. I used to have a no-fail relationship management strategy. Before things got too close and intimate, I’d blow the relationship up. I’d break it off or create an irresolvable situation. By so doing, I was able to keep the pain of self-disclosure and exposure at bay for years. Sure, it was lonely. but it worked.

So I am on the phone with this old friend and desperately hoping she can sense and hear my pain and I spew my inflamed and irritated feelings all over the conversation. In a healthy and reasonable response, she backs off, shuts down and changes gear.

I am no longer the “old friend.” I am the supplicant. A problem to be solved. An object of pity and sadness. The Margot that drives her crazy. I gotta tell ya, that summary sucks.

And yet I clearly see how we have evolved into this place. We have hardly talked but a few times to catch up in recent months (years?). She has walked with me through a dozen major and minor crises in my life (largely self-created) over several decades. Her comparatively stable upbringing is the calm and centering counterpoint to my chaotic upbringing.

But I am a peripheral friend. An artifact of our college days. Outside her core of sensible and compatible friends who are calm and centered like she is. She has been a good friend nonetheless but time is having its way with us.

No longer the easy and familiar camaraderie. No longer the unspoken understandings that write the shorthand of longtime familiarity. Not much idea either of what is going in each other or in our lives that makes conversation fluid and empathetic.

I’m not grieving exactly. Our friendship is not finished. I am having to adjust to how it has altered. And why it has altered. My self-absorption and rumination would be part of it. But also our lives have changed in ways neither of us can fully appreciate. How could we? We haven’t seen each other face-to-face for years.

The loci of her life and of mine have separately shifted to the point of being unrecognizable to each other. I have not visited or even seen the new house she and her husband moved in to over two years ago. Even members of a kaffeeklatsch are more intimate.

I love her dearly and have always been profoundly grateful to have her in my life. But there have been periods of strain between us (some longer than others). Sometimes I marveled that the friendship held up at all.

i’ve always harbored the nagging feeling of being on the rim of her life as something of an interesting oddity. But trusting she found me bright and engaging enough to make a continued friendship worthwhile.

We talked about the weirdness of our last phone call. She found it weird, too. She identified an old and objectionable pattern in me where negative emotions took me over and ruled the day. I will try not to make that mistake again.

She is to be forgiven for not wanting to tolerate how pain manifests in me as it can be contagious. And it’s pretty self-absorbed. She likely has no idea how humiliating and upsetting it is to know my childhood deficiencies still manifest inappropriately.

I was heartened a year or two ago when she sent me something of a personal manifesto in an email. She wrote about carving out her own space and reclaiming her soul after a life devoted to serving others. She wanted to figure out how she wants to be and what she wants to keep in her life moving forward. Right on, said I.

My old saw: nothing in life is constant but change. She is now a long-married, happily retired professional woman who gallivants about North America and the world in her retirement while she and her husband still can. I am happy for them. It is a well-deserved coda to a good woman’s life.

Our friendship will continue. Most probably not apace. I received no signals that I’ve been kicked to the proverbial curb (yet!) in her emotional and psychic sorting process. I will try to be more careful and considerate in times of personal stress and strain. She is quite right. She doesn’t need that in her life.

It is an old and valuable friendship that has been through many shared experiences and challenges. The friendship is still there and still valuable. It has simply changed. Which was inevitable and up to me to adjust to. I’m learning the adjustments just keep on coming as we spend more time on the planet. Such is life.

Love you, old friend.

To Each Their Own

As soon as we’re born, we all get some challenge to wrassle with. Some affliction or obstacle that we have to overcome or learn to live with. I’ve observed certain obstacles seem to run in families.

In our family, it was alcoholism and mental health. If there was an upside to being born in an environment where those issues were at play, I learned stuff. Of course, I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t necessarily want to know but we don’t get to choose what hand we are dealt. The learning is lifelong.

Alcoholism is generally regarded in society as a “personal failing” or “a disease.” Alcoholism is often systematic with deep roots in a family’s history or the surrounding society. Ireland and drinking are practically synonyms.

Booze is an especially treacherous opponent because it works. Alcohol can numb our pain and make us feel better even if only temporarily. And temporary is all most people need. A stiff drink to “settle” your nerves. A celebratory toast. Or four. A bridge in social groups to ease discomfort or self-consciousness.

Like many other afflictions, it can be hard to pin down the exact moment when booze shifts from being a “friendly visitor” into a monkey on your back. Dealing with alcoholism myself, there were a few turning points. I lived the dynamic with booze that AA calls “cunning and powerful.”

As my drinking got worse, my body absorbed it more easily and I once experienced a blackout. It is alarming to not have any recall of a particular event or outing. When I saw the car in the driveway one morning and had no idea how it got there, I knew my choices were to heal or to die.

I have read that the Universe can be quite systematic in showing you that you are going off the rails. When you are just starting to head in the wrong direction, it may just jostle you a bit.

You might get klutzier than usual. Maybe break a few things in your house. Lose stuff more frequently. Or you might come down with frequent head colds. if you aren’t paying attention, the jostling can get worse.

I was in a relationship that I should not have been in for a bunch of reasons. We were in a car accident in the early days and had a minor fender bender. Some months later (same relationship), we hit and killed a deer on a back country road. Severe damage to the car.

The third accident – after the relationship ended and we were talking about reuniting – nearly killed us. We were broadsided by someone who ran a red light. Totaled the car. I was concussed and suffered a broken collarbone.

It was only in retrospect that the pattern of increasingly severe accidents became clear. It sure feels like I was being given a message to get the hell out of there.

Emerging from an unstable childhood with excessive drinking and wacky adult behavior all around me prepared me to be flexible. It probably made me resilient. I can easily spot dysfunctional wackiness in other adults (of the deleterious kind – not that of the fun and harmless wackos whom I love dearly).

Other families may have a history of DNA challenges that shape them: Huntington’s disease or MS or autoimmune disorders or ALS or a certain birth defect. The list goes on. Each family and family member has to accept and prepare for the possibility of that affliction popping up in their life up the road. No family is spared though the afflictions vary widely.

The good news is that we can grow out of these restrictions and learn how to manage them as adults. In my case, I gave up drinking almost a quarter of a century ago. I sought out counsellors for years as I tried to raise my family alone and recover from a rocky childhood.

Other good news is that whatever challenges we faced in our family can put us on a path of growth and exploration as adults. I could do nothing about the circumstances into which I was born. No one can. But I had and have ample choice in choosing what I had to do to live with it.

Choice is freedom. Those of us who came from difficult backgrounds where healthy choices were scarce may better appreciate our available choices as adults. Then it is up to us to improve our own lives and leave those circumstances in the dustbin of history where they belong.

There is usually no choice to change our inherited challenges (such as carrying a defective gene). As adults, however, our job is learning to carry whatever that burden is and face it with grace.

Then one day, you may get the chance to support someone else in similar circumstances who may benefit from your insight and knowledge about that issue. If you’re lucky.

Even Keel

I would love to feel every day exactly as I do this morning. Calm. Grounded. Mostly untroubled (though I could probably stir things up pretty quickly by glancing at my “to-do” list! So I won’t.)

I am nearing the end of my grieving process for the lost forest behind us. I recognize I have gone through the five stages of grieving made famous by Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five common stages of grief, popularly referred to as DABDA. They include:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

I have gone through nearly all of them. I am transitioning from depression to acceptance. What is happening on that back lot is not within my control. It never was.

I did give the legal route a try and contacted the county powers-that-be and came up with bupkis. Apparently, disrupting a neighbor’s dream and destroying their privacy is not sufficient for a “stop build” order.

So I’ve learned things about grief and the process it wends its way through. Not for the first time.

I’m not sure anyone can adequately prepare themselves for grief. It is one of those things that reads much differently on the page than it feels in real life.

None of us can prepare for the shredding of our reality by the departure of someone or something that matters deeply to us. Whether that is a person, or a pet, or the availability of something or a dream. And yet, we all have – or most certainly will – experience loss.

I have a regular habit I employ now when I expect bad news. I erect a psychological barrier. Bad news coming by mail: don’t open it. Bad news coming by phone: don’t answer it. Bad news at your front door: don’t answer that either.

Not indefinitely, but for as long as it takes to shore up my inner resources and prepare. We are often given the gift of time to prepare with an impending death. It does not necessarily make the actual loss easier. But pre-grieving is a real thing that allows us to imagine what life will be when she/him/it/they are not longer present.

I did it with both of my parents.

Their age and infirmities set me up to begin grieving them long before they left. It did not change how I was with them in the day-to-day. It built an emotional cushion inside me and made space for the inevitable loss. In both deaths, there was grieving but also relief and resolution. In sudden or premature death, that is not always possible.

Processing grief is critical if we are to move on in life. I have a friend who lost her young adult daughter suddenly and violently in a car crash. More than twenty years later, that loss is still the core of her emotional life. It has driven her to an alcoholism and a gambling addiction. She is neither fully engaged nor present in her everyday life.

Leaving the emotional safety of grief can be a terrifying leap of faith. It is a common, if ineffective, way to keep someone’s presence in your life even when they are emphatically gone. When grief has not been processed and integrated, it can screw us up and stunt our growth and healing.

My friend has found comfort and escape in booze and gambling. Not the most healthy response. Her behavior hurts not only her but those around her. Yet there is nothing anyone can do unless she elects to do something differently. That is the responsibility of being an adult.

These past few weeks (months maybe) have been exceedingly difficult. Not only because of the lost forest but other losses and realizations. Though our house move was mostly positive, it has been incredibly taxing. I have learned I am not as strong and energetic as I once was. I am more and more aware of our limited time on the planet.

I have been advised to learn to let go. I once described my self as someone who clung to the mast on a boat (my life) that was shipwrecked and taking on water fast. That worked for a long time though I know how much I missed with my inflexibility and neuroses. No matter. I survived.

I am going in a different direction now and making different choices. And this morning’s mood was an unexpected payoff. Peace actually is possible even in the face of disappointment and loss. Even if it takes awhile to get there.

Damned if I am going to spit in god’s face for the gifts and good things I have in my life by letting loss overwhelm me. God will deal with the perpetrators in time and in his/her own way. Or not.

Good and Evil Basics

I used to be very confused about the difference between good and evil. It became something of an obsession. I tried to make sense of an adult world where there was a lot of saying one thing and doing another.

My mother used to talk about “white lies.” Statements that were somehow meant to “hide unpleasant facts” or “protect someone’s feelings.” It all seemed a little skewed and manipulative to me even as a young girl.

Sometimes it was a case of killing an ant with a sledgehammer. Overkill and unnecessary. Other times, it sure looked like someone (okay, my mother) was covering up some embarrassing lapse.

I am not advocating running around callously telling our complete truth to everyone we meet. That can get downright rude and cruel. And socially isolating. Integrity is based on the quality of your own degree of honesty with yourself.

It is a move away from the “nobody will notice” approach to morality to a perspective of “I will notice.” If we’re lucky, we eventually become our own gauge for standards and accountability. It is one of the key moral transitions we have to make to be fully adult.

So now here we are – full adults. The line between good and evil seems a lot less black and white rather than shades of grey on a continuum. Do I try to find the owner of that $20 I just found in the parking lot? Do I tell Auntie Mae what I think of her new fuchsia hat (with felt flowers) when asked? Do I decline the party invite outright or make up a mealy-mouthed (and dishonest) excuse?

Small challenges in the scheme of things, I realize. But small things have a way of growing into big things. And there is a universal truth about stepping over a forbidden line making it harder to step back into an honorable way of being. In the parlance, it’s called a “slippery slope.”

It is like the tragedy of crack addiction. It is often said one hit and you are on a runaway downhill train. Not starting something is a whole lot easier than quitting something we’ve begun.

On the upside, life does give us the gift of internalization in the maturation process. Once we have adopted and taken in a sense of morality as our own, we don’t think about it much as we go about our daily lives. It is just who we are. That’s a blessing.

The tiny discernments we make between good and evil do little to affect the larger good and evil in the world. But there is one thing that is certain, by being a good example of honesty and decency to yourself, you are not contributing to making things worse.

And you are likely a lot more interesting and pleasant person to be around. At least, compared to the legions of sleazy and lying schmucks out there.

Anomie

I first heard the word anomie in a sociology lecture. Anomie means: “social instability caused by erosion of standards and values, or, alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals.”

We are living in a state of anomie. I don’t know about anyone else but general consensus on just about everything is in short supply and a hard commodity to come by lately. I used to know what to focus on and give attention to. And I used to know why what I did was important to me.

I have memories of periods of intense focus. Spending a whole weekend (or a few) surrounded by books and papers doing research for an essay. Playing some sport that kept me outdoors and running around for hours. Either at a beach or maybe on a mountain.

A full evening of social time with friends may have started at 8 in the evening and could go on into the wee small hours of the morning. Not a cellphone in sight or in our imaginations.

There wasn’t another single activity that was more important than doing what we were doing in that moment. I’m not naive. There was plenty of “zoning out” in those days, too, but generally.

What’s missing today, I find, is global “permission” to carve out those unfettered blocks of time without feeling some sort of guilt or FOMO – fear of missing out. We don’t even agree anymore about where and what it is important to focus on.

I am way too susceptible to distractions. And there are plenty of distractions these days. We all know what they are and I know I am not alone. I believe we are all feeling it.

I am reading more and more articles about putting a label on these crazy times and collectively pray it is only a phase. A phase that has been ongoing for a good decade or more.

The world is grotesquely out of balance and that is not sustainable. I will not watch news coverage about Gaza. I cannot handle that level of inhumanity and insanity. Yet, clearly many do.

Watch it and shudder or sigh or inhale a half a cheesecake. These are very bad times for the easily triggered.

We can’t always see ahead to when and how things might slip off the rails. In our lives, for example. There are indicators. And if we don’t see them and pay attention, there will be consequences. Ignore them at our peril.

That cavity you avoid getting filled. That bank balance consistently slipping into overdraft. The credit card statements that “somehow” keep getting bigger and bigger. You’ll experience the consequences soon enough.

Consequences today seem haphazardly dispensed. Shady politicians and career criminals carry on blithely with minimal fear of paying any price for their actions.

That George Santos was expelled from Congress was a minor miracle that occurred this week. My question has been: how did he get as far as he did in Congress in the first place? Where is our system of checks and balances?

Sadly, the answer seems to be that it has eroded dramatically.

An insane system is kept relevant by enablers who either allow or participate in letting the insanity continue. Personally, I haven’t got the stomach for it.

So I am in full retreat. I am most reluctant to put myself on the line publicly for my beliefs. It has become a more private occupation contained within a circle of people I trust and like. That is where I choose to put my focus these days.

I have been testing society’s floorboards of late and find them a little spongy. If that were to happen in a real house, I would slowly withdraw from the room and back away to prevent being hurt.

I no longer have term papers to write but there are other activities that can absorb my attention. Books are always available. As is “me-time.” In a world where the rules have gone out the window and everyone seems to be in survival mode, it seems the most reasonable option.

Bide A While

I am stepping outside my usual 3-4 minute post length (a full 8 minute read!) to accommodate the wisdom in this thoughtful piece by Maria Popova from The Marginalian.

Maria Popova has been running this one-woman online publishing show for seventeen years.

I consistently find value in her offerings. And while this is a little longer than my norm, I decided to republish this piece in toto to honor the exercise and wisdom Popova has collected.

You can choose to skim read just the bulleted highlights. Or dive down into the accompanying text. In either case, you might consider taking to heart her wisdom about life. She is a seeker.

She encourages us to remember: If we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.

Herewith, 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring(though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one
way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
Maria Popova, The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/10/22/17/?mc_cid=c7335a91fc&mc_eid=82e7b7e93e

Unfussy Christmas

Christmas doesn’t fuss me much. Not these days at least.

What a production it was earlier in my life though. The tree and its trimming and laying in special Christmas goodies like mincemeat tarts and shortbread cookies and cranberry/orange relish and fruitcake if it was good enough. It was quite the process.

I get that mincemeat is not to everyone’s taste and that there is no meat involved. Still, to me, it was a delicious annual treat, if one with a confusing name.

Obviously Christmas intensified when children arrived on the planet. Not in their early years, of course. But by about four or five years old, they were beside themselves in the weeks leading up to Christ’s so-called birthday, to say nothing of Christmas morning.

Such memories I have. I took the kids to a ski hill one Christmas and we rented a cabin for the weekend. Truth was that by early evening, I was bushed. I couldn’t haul myself back to the car in the parking lot to grab the wrapped presents from “Santa Claus.”

No worries, I thought, I’ll get out and get them before the kids wake up. Every right-thinking parent knows – and prepares for – kids being up before the sun cracks the horizon.

I was confronted by two teary-eyed children, bleating: “Santa didn’t find us!!!” My heart sank into my boots. I’m still not sure how I managed to retrieve the gifts and get them back into the cabin. Maybe I said Santa left them in the car? I expect the kids treated all of their Christmas gifts and Santa Claus with well-deserved skepticism after that.

An indelible Christmas memory was getting together at my sister’s house to make Indian food as the celebratory dinner. We had travelled in Asia back in the day and had fallen in love with Indian food. Masala dosas became my favorite breakfast food for a time.

I am convinced we discovered butter chicken long before the North American marketplace did. Butter chicken everything – sauce, frozen dinner, “ready to cook” kits – is now ubiquitous in grocery stores everywhere. But we found it first! (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

The Indian feast had as many elements we could replicate of the fabulous dishes we discovered in India. Butter chicken (of course). Saag paneer (spinach and Indian cheese.) Chickpea curry. Vegetable curry (for my vegetarian sister.) Pappadum. My own handmade puri.

That simple fried bread is a miracle of cookery. Three ingredients. Throw them together. Roll the dough into hand sized rounds, flatten them and throw them into heated oil. And voila! The puri puff up and look like mini-footballs to sop up butter chicken and all the assorted dishes and pickles and chutneys. Delicious mini-footballs, I might add.

Over the years, we experimented by trying on many different Christmas traditions. I bought a book called the $100 Christmas and tried to pull off the demands of the season on a strict budget. Another time, it was a baking-focussed Christmas.

One year, I made shortbread cookies – my absolute favorite – and boxed them up to send to my father. I was so proud to have actually finished the project, packed them up and got them in the mail well before Christmas Day.

When they finally arrived, Dad expressed his appreciation for my thoughtful gift. He said he was going to really enjoy the box of shortbread crumbs I had sent him.

As the years rolled on, Christmas traditions fluctuated based on a number of things. Who of our friends or family was around for Christmas. Cost of travel. Our ability to meet those travel costs. Work deadlines or school deadlines. Romantic interests who preferred we spend Christmas on our own. Whether the kids were expected to spend that Christmas with me or with their Eastern family.

These days, Christmas is pared down to the basics. A two foot rosemary tree is the Christmas tree now and sits on the coffee table. The heat of short candles powers traditional metal angel chimes which adds some festive ambience. There is a fresh evergreen wreath on the front door. That’s about it.

Adult children make their holiday plans now with friends and family. I’ve even stopped giving them the traditional fine chocolate-filled Advent calendars that I gave them every year since they were little.

We make Christmas. Individually and collectively. Ours will be a little toned down from years past but no matter. It works perfectly well for me and mine.

That seems the best way to honor the meaning of the season in this house. Hope JC and his family approve.

It’s Not All About You

When I was younger, I was sure I was the source of every problem that cropped up in my life. And why wouldn’t I? I had a parent who was devoted to that narrative.

She flatly told me: “I love you but I don’t like you.” I couldn’t disagree with her. I didn’t much like myself.

But it takes a certain insidious brilliance to turn a struggling child’s every misstep into making them believe they have some core defect. Even moreso to blithely disregard the deficiencies and exposure to harm in the child’s upbringing into which that parent placed the child.

I guess I was supposed to take responsibility for that, too.

The dynamic is all too common and well understood in the therapeutic community. A child whose needs are not met and whose pain and needs are ignored will slowly come to the conclusion there is something wrong with them.

They cannot place the blame on their caregivers as their lives literally depend on them. And if they did, what power would they have to change anything? None.

I’ve been considering this lately in light of certain struggles in my life. I have been trying to evaluate where to draw the line between my responsibility and that of the perpetrator. It is not easy to work out when you were raised as I was.

Throw into the mix that I am a woman. Women are often perceived as bossy and mouthy and difficult and “other” when we speak up or out about something we take issue with.

I once read about a woman (maybe you know who it was; I don’t) who said: “I don’t know whether I am a feminist or not. I do know I am labeled a feminist whenever I speak up or take any action that distinguishes me from a doormat.”

I was lately labelled “fiery” by a new neighbor. I have often been called “intimidating.” I never got what that meant exactly. It probably meant I was not completely on board playing the requisite political games to advance my career. I paid the price but have no regrets about speaking up about what bothered me.

I may have extended my life (I hope the Universe doesn’t smite me for making this comment) by giving full voice to my pain and aggravations. I have not often held back my opinion or silenced my voice in the face of present or pending harm as an adult. Corrosive or angry feelings were often given full voice. Not very sophisticated or smart, I know.

All to say, I can relate to those who struggle with finding and using their voice. I am always surprised by the blowback experienced by people who choose to speak up. Like whistleblowers.

If there was ever any doubt about the power of words and expression, you need look no farther than the fate of recent whistleblowers for examples. Perception is reality. When a whistleblower speaks up about something that they feel is wrong, the usual defense tactic is to smear that person’s character and discredit them in the public eye. It usually works.

It strikes me how similar this is to the dynamic of the dysfunctional family. Truth is elusive and can be very subjective. This is in direct opposition to what we are led to believe about “honesty” and “transparency.”

In truth, it is a balancing act we struggle with from cradle to grave. Even a person raised in a perfectly happy and functional family soon has to learn “the rules” of whatever world they get involved in as adults. Some “worlds” are more desirable than others. All depends on whether you choose to make your career on Wall Street or Sesame Street.

Wherever you land, you are making constant judgment calls and tradeoffs between your truth and the shared reality you operate in. Most can suck up the shared reality and its inherent imbalances and hypocrisy for the payoffs in money or good reputation.

Children raised from childhood without consistent support for their emerging voices and inclinations may have more difficulties. They may have much more trouble discerning and acting on discrepancies in problems not clearly and easily attributable to “them” or to “me.”

It is a learned vulnerability. I am discovering that – while infinitely better than it was earlier – the grooves of self-doubt can be hard to surmount. Even knowing that makes it much easier than it was to discern between the “true” ownership of a problem. And its resolution.

You may play a part in your struggles but you are not operating in a vacuum. True, you must take responsibility to resolve problems as they arise. Determining the level of responsibility you must take comes down to a decision about what you can and cannot control.

Know that and sort out whether or if you can do anything about a problematic situation. If you can’t, do yourself a favor.

Walk away.

Florida

Sun, sea and sand!!! The enduring image of the state of Florida. It seems it has been advertising its sunny and seductive presence to winter weary northerners in a palette of pinks and pale blue and orange forever.

Invariably garish. Gigantic billboards. Often in neon. Bigger than life. Florida and oranges have always been closely associated.

I have lived in Florida off and on now for over eight years. I could not be more surprised to find myself here but such are the mysteries of both life and love. It is much less gaudy place than I remember it from the Fifties.

One winter, my parents decided to drive to Florida. They followed the route snowbirds still take today. The I-95 interstate highway opened in 1956 and started on the Canada/US border from New Brunswick at Houlton, Maine.

The impetuosity of that trip fits what I remember about my father’s character. A new and interesting option had opened up. I can see him intrigued and eager to explore. So that is what he did. Headed South on the big, brand new highway, with his family in tow.

We often stayed at Howard Johnson motels along the way. My heart would jump when we pulled into the parking lot and saw the familiar orange and blue logo looming large in front of us.

Howard Johnson no doubt had amenities like swimming pools and vending machines to lure families in. All I cared about were the clam strips. Unreplicated in any restaurant I’ve ever been to until this very day. Perhaps that is nostalgia’s memory.

My most real and enduring memory of Florida was driving our car on the beach. I was beside myself with excitement. We drove on the sand in our big maroon Chevy with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and miles of beach grass beside us as far as the eye could see. I was surprised we didn’t sink.

I remember the wind whipping through the open car windows. The sun beating down from a blue and cloudless sky. The sense of joy and freedom of that day is unmatched in my memory.

I remember little else of that vacation except warm, happy memories. I must give a nod to Georgia. The old plantations were open to tourists where beautiful Southern belles sauntered in elaborate and colorful hoop skirts with parasols to match. There were demigoddesses in the eyes of an impressionable child. I may have aspired to be one when I grew up.

What was not evident at the time were black people. Maybe I couldn’t make a distinction back then. Perhaps there weren’t any in the locations we visited. Black voices would have been mostly silent in that time. Especially in the South. Blessedly, we saw no strange fruit hanging anywhere. It may simply have been that they were kept well away from the tourist traps.

Florida today has not lost the natural beauty, warmth and tropic lusciousness it has in my memory. But I cast my mind back through the tumultuous social history the US has gone through in the sixty-odd years since our family had that momentous vacation.

Florida today is a world where unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was brutally and senselessly murdered by a paranoid white man. It is where the USA’s only female serial killer was executed, less than an hour from where I still live. It is the home of radical, lifelong Republicans to whom Trumpism is next to godliness. Store clerks still wish everyone a “blessed day.”

Change when it comes can either be painfully slow and way too sudden. We seek oases of calm and stability in a world that is marked by constant change. In Florida, it is a fascinating and perplexing mix of old South, tourist mecca, retirees’ paradise (no state income tax is one hell of a draw) and ongoing tension between races and social classes.

We live in a predominantly white community. Yet only a few miles away, in a poorer section, a young black mother of four was killed on her doorstep by an angry white woman because the black woman’s children inadvertently trespassed on her property.

That seems the general Zeitgeist in America today. Uneasy tensions abound. The center cannot hold. Indeed, these days there doesn’t seem to be much of a center at all.

But Florida is still here. If the world does not soon implode, it always will be. Sunny. Seductive. Awash in sun, sea, sand and Disney characters. It changes when you live here. You see these elements for the marketing advantages they are. Day to day life is different. Just day to day life.

A more personal pain point is that Hojo’s went bankrupt and has gone out of business. No more exquisite clam strips.

Such is the egocentricity of self-interest. Such is the refuge of the politically impotent. And the politically discouraged.

Think I’ll head to the pool for a swim.

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